The Leicester gap

Until 1987, there was still a busy stretch of British main line railway where traditional Victorian operating practices were used to control the movements of both express passenger and a variety of freight trains.

At the heart of the former Midland Railway main line from St Pancras to Sheffield, the 45-mile section between Irchester in Northamptonshire and Loughborough in Nottinghamshire was equipped with semaphore signals worked from twenty-three mechanical signalboxes.

It was the last main line in the country where this once-standard arrangement remained virtually unchanged since the days of steam.

This pocket of mechanical signalling was christened The Leicester Gap, because Leicester was to be the site of a new power signalbox, the last in a chain of just five that would control the whole of the Midland Main Line into the twenty-first century.